[LINK] What are our priorities?

[Daniel Rose]

This should not be construed as an excuse for piracy, but it needs to be
said again.

Because someone bought Photoshop 7 in Bali for $4, does NOT mean that they
would have otherwise bought it at the retail price.

It doesn't even mean they would have paid $20, I've met many people who seem
to buy this stuff in SE Asia and bring it back just for bragging rights.

I like the use of the word robbed also, AFAIK it means you theft directly
from an individual, as in armed-, highway-, daylight- and so on.

Taken to an extreme; if the pen is mightier than the sword, and I fib on my
flex sheet, that makes me an armed robber.

Noone would put up with that in the press, why put up with this below? 

Lastly, illegal copying isn't part of the market by definition, and so can't
account for a third of it, now can it?

Regards,


Daniel Rose                     62621599
Postmaster/Helpdesk
National Library of Australia




-----Original Message-----
From: Glen Turner [mailto:glen.turner at aarnet.edu.au] 
Sent: Thursday, 26 February 2004 10:06 AM
To: Jan Whitaker
Cc: link at anu.edu.au
Subject: Re: [LINK] What are our priorities?


Jan Whitaker wrote:

> Figures from the Australasian Film and Video Security Office showed 
> cinema and video piracy robbed the industry of $100 million in 2002, 
> while pirated video games added another $60 million to lost earnings.
> 
> Software piracy accounts for around a third of the market, costing the 
> industry $138.5 million in 2002.

We really must get away from the idea that the retail price
of software is its value.  Surely all these "pirates" form
a large enough group for a competitive site license :-)

Applying that thought, shoplifting at Woolies looks like
a bigger problem then software copying.
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